Who's online

pulsar's blog

Last week I've ordered a new shiny root server at hetzner. A nice 8gb Server begging me to install XEN on its virgin 750GB Raid HD. Hell yeah, but wait, I need to run 32 Bit XEN-Guests on that one. After a quick glance at the current Debian XEN packages I decided not to install the 64 bit variant of Debian as the Domain-0. Unfortunately Debian is still stuck at 3.0.x which doesn't allow 32-on-64 setups (which I have found no documentation for anyway).

Ok, 32 bit it is. To my very disappointment I had to discover the lack of PAE extensions in the XEN-Kernel. But why-o-why is the hypervisor package flagged with PAE extensions but not the kernel? So, what now? One option has been to go with a XEN Setup from the sources. For obvious reasons I'd rather like to have a distribution run solely on official stable packages.

I’ve always wanted to take a look at Debian's younger brother - Ubuntu. Thank god Hetzner did offer easy and convenient image-base setup for various Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 7.10. Setup and first XEN steps went like a breeze. Soon I have found myself running XEN on 32 Bit with full PAE support being able to address all of my tiny little ram bits. YAY!

Time to migrate some XEN-U guests to the new machine. Fortunately the old server was also located at the same collocation center, so the copy process did not take too long. The fun did not last any longer though. The very first boot of the guest OS resulted in a frozen console. No login. WTF!? After fiddling with various Kernel options and googling myself into madness I have found some very interesting facts.

I've been toying with the recent version of VirtualDub today. I have managed to capture my Desktop at 30 FPS using a resolution of 768x576. Very nice. Perhaps cheap solution for tutorial videos. Have a look:

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialise correctly.

The Flash Movie has been re-encoded using Riva FLV Encoder 2.0. Bitrate was set to 1600 kbps - which produces a lot of artifacts as you can see. I've been using a motion jpeg codec for the live recording which looks just perfect. I wonder how to encode flash videos using h264, wasn't the latest Flash 9 update supposed to support that format?

codewut is German and means code-fury. So expect this place to be rather code centric. My motivation to get this page up and running using Drupal is pretty simple: get a decent platform for publishing software, code snippets, thoughts and my stories about my life as a software developer in no time.